Thursday, September 10, 2015

My Hopes for HobokenI write to share my ideas and hopes for a better downtown Hoboken.

As your councilman, I will fight for common sense constituent concerns – items that should be top priority, but have fallen by the wayside. I will ensure that our streets are free of potholes and trash, that proper lighting and crossing signals are installed and demand trash receptacles at every intersection. I will be available to all my neighbors, ensuring you have a responsive and professional connection to City Hall. And I will work constructively with everyone ---whether they agree or disagree with me politically---to make sure our neighborhood needs are addressed.

On the larger issues facing downtown, I will use my five years of land use experience on our City’s Zoning Board and advocate for sensible and innovative building projects at the Neumann Leathers factory site and NJT Rail Yards. We can make these locations spaces that encourage arts, entertainment and commerce – like Chelsea Market in NYC or Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. Ensuring responsible development that brings more vibrancy, while maintaining our community’s existing scale is critical to improving our quality of life.

I believe we can and must make improvements to Washington Street, which to us in the First Ward is more than a business district; it is our back yard. And we must make sure that Hoboken remains affordable for our working families, our middle class residents and our seniors and that requires holding the line on taxes through fiscal discipline.

I pledge to bring the new energy we need and to fight hard every day for a better downtown Hoboken!

Whether you think it's an affront to Democracy or parallels sinister Zimmerists which are hiding in every corner of the City Clerk's Office, a fifth ward City Council candidacy lies perilously in the balance.

As the ballot positions will be drawn noon at City Hall tomorrow, the unofficial deadline for rendering fixes for ballot deficiencies is likely 4:00 pm today.

Melissa Blanco needs 59 registered voter petitions to confirm a position on the ballot for fifth ward council. She's submitted in the neighborhood of 40 with the remainder of approximately 80 not registered voters or residents of the fifth ward.

Unofficially, her deficit is only 19 fifth ward petitions.

Melissa Blanco, an apparent vehement hater of Mayor Zimmer and Reform appears immobilized by contradictory statements about her deficient petition status. She's allegedly commenting under various screen names speaking about her petition problem in the third person but doesn't appear to be making any actual effort or headway to come up with the needed 19 petitions to rectify the deficiency.

In the meantime as everyone awaits action, Blanco has apparently been on a tear, pointing fingers everywhere and incoherently commenting in the third person on websites around town claiming or so it seems that the laws about counting unregistered voters under NJ and/or federal laws favor her not the City Clerk's Office tabulation. She further appears to claim the unregistered voter petitions must count toward her total while simultaneously saying being a write-in candidate wouldn't be so bad.

It's all quite dizzying. What is Blanco doing? According to one source, calls come in every day to City Hall but no actual petition deficiency is actually addressed. She's not made any changes or dropped off the approximately 19 petitions she needs to get on the ballot.

Yesterday, after the latest court appearance in Jersey City with Councilwoman Beth Mason, Da Horsey spotted Blanco crossing the street with her two dogs, no petitions in hand.